


The Color of His Brother's Voice

by atlas_white



Category: The Secret Series - Pseudonymous Bosch
Genre: Canon Compliant, Coda, Gen, Synesthesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-01
Updated: 2015-03-01
Packaged: 2018-03-15 21:15:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3462347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atlas_white/pseuds/atlas_white
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He had never once doubted the Midnight Sun. If he ever doubted it, his fate would be sealed, and that is exactly what happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Color of His Brother's Voice

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the entire series, particularly the final book.

_[Dr. L] Luciano Bergamo - The Color of His Brother's Voice_

He had never once doubted the Midnight Sun. When the Golden Lady showed up that fateful night with her promises of power and immortality, a young Luciano Bergamo had been eager to listen and to follow-- too eager, but he had only been ten years old then. She was beautiful, and she was wicked, and soon he would be, too. 

Still, Dr. L wondered where he'd gone wrong. When he woke up at night, crying his brother's name, sweat on his perfect silver brow, he knew that something was wrong. He wished he could go back in time and change his brother's mind about Mauvais, about the Midnight Sun, about all of it. He shouldn't have had that kind of longing, but he did. It had lingered ever since that night when Mauvais had bought him from the ringmaster as if he were a circus souvenir instead of a young prodigy. It was a longing that called to Pietro with the whole of his heart. 

Members of the Midnight Sun were taught to put away their emotions. Mauvais certainly never showed any, even toward him, her student and near-constant companion. Even the lowest of their order never so much as showed a smile or a frown. But here he was, the great Dr. L, still waking up longing for his brother, his twin, his other half. He would see him as a boy, the way he'd left him, he'd hear him call out his childhood name and see the color of his voice, making him feel young and small and vulnerable. He'd feel angry and sick, and try desperately to put those feelings away. But he always knew they would be back to haunt him another desperate night. They always came back. 

It got worse after what he could only call "the accident"-- the singular moment that changed the course of his entire life so subtly that he never even saw it. Simply put, right after they found _him_ , Pietro, Dr. L's long-lost brother; found out where he was living and working, there was an accident, and just like that, he was gone. There was nothing left of him but an ugly black stain and a set of teeth. It seemed unreal. He wouldn't believe it until he saw it for himself. 

When they visited the house, filled with his brother's scent and the soft gold it put in the corners of his vision, Dr. L kept his expression carefully measured, but inside there was something stirring in him that he could not afford to indulge. The smell of sulfur was strong in the kitchen, and the greenish color was hard to see through. Still, he couldn't miss the black stains. 

That night, his dreams were filled once again with visions of his brother, but this time they were nightmares. He smelled and saw the odour of sulfur, heard alarm bells ringing through the air, bright reds flashing across his vision to mingle with the color of his brother's desperate voice. Then there was the fire, and the tent that they'd worked together in all those years ago was burning down, down all around them, and he was paralyzed, unable to reach out to his twin. Dr. L woke up screaming. 

\-- 

He never once doubted the Midnight Sun. That was because he was wicked. He spirited gifted children away from their homes just like Mauvais had done to him when he was a child, just a boy blossoming into an adolescent. He'd been gifted, too, born with synesthesia, envied by his peers for all the wondrous things he could see and hear and smell and feel that they could not. But that never stopped him from taking other children without sparing a single thought for the families they were leaving behind. He didn't have time to think of such things. The realm of his dreams might be haunted by his brother's memory, but in the daytime, he was heartless and unfeeling, and nothing could have been further from his mind. 

The difference when he and Mauvais took Benjamin Blake from his school was in the little girl that went chasing after him-- _Cassandra_. That wasn't a name he would ever forget, not for the rest of his life. He expected then that he would live forever, but no matter how the centuries stretched, that girl would always have a place in his mind. She was stubborn and foolish and strong-- in the end, she even managed to rescue little Benjamin-- but truly what shocked him into paying attention to her was the way that she deceived him. 

His heart leaped at the idea of his brother being alive-- oh, the idea of seeing him, of seeing Pietro again, was so much more important than anything to him right then that he couldn't think even of keeping up the pretense of a neutral, emotionless face. He began to shout in their native tongue, the sound and taste and color of Italian words like long-lost friends to him as he searched desperately for Pietro. Where could he be hiding? Was he here in the pyramid? Was he in danger? Even if he'd come to try and foil their plans, Dr. L didn't care as long as it meant his brother was here and still living! 

Ah, but all he found was that he'd been tricked. The pain he felt then was as terrible as if he had been burned along with the pyramid around him, torn apart like the books in their library as it was destroyed by the fire from that wild girl. 

The girl, _Cassandra_ , had used the Symphony of Smells, used the code that he and his brother had invented that only the two of them were ever supposed to know. She had read the journal where Pietro had kept his memories. She knew what he'd written and what was in the vials. She had been to Pietro's house and touched his things. Perhaps she had even met him, before he was killed. The idea touched whatever had stirred in him when he'd heard the news of the accident, and immediately Dr. L was fascinated. 

Certainly he couldn't honestly say that his only interest in Cassandra was the interest of the Midnight Sun. She reminded him of his brother in a great many ways, and in a way acted as a kind of link back to him. He wanted to be close to her in ways he knew were perfectly depraved. He could make her immortal like himself, if that's what it took, and she could be his acolyte. 

That wouldn't stop him from destroying her, if it came to that, but he certainly didn't want to. He was wicked, and he liked the idea of making her his student the way he had become student to Mauvais, and taken on the ways of the Midnight Sun. He would make her his own, if he could, and watch her blossom into her destiny both as the Secret Keeper and as his right hand. 

He knew why he wanted that, but he didn't want to admit it to himself. Having Cassandra by his side would be the next best thing to having Pietro back, alive and with him once again. 

\-- 

He had never once doubted the Midnight Sun. When he received word that Pietro was alive after all, Dr. L felt a rush of relief so great that he had to excuse himself and indulge it, just for a moment or two, back pressed against the wall in his private chamber with his breath hitching as his flawless body tried and failed to remember how to cry. 

It didn't matter that Pietro had sided with the Terces Society-- that he was its leader now, in fact-- or that he could not go and see him. What mattered was that Pietro was alive and safe somewhere, right then. Dr. L had learned what pain and horror he would feel if his brother were killed. He reveled deeply in the security of knowing that he was still out there, that it hadn't been true after all. Even if they met as enemies, it was good enough knowing that they could meet again at all. 

As quickly as that moment of relief came, it left him again. Dr. L sniffed and hastily put away the feeling of weakness that had gotten the better of him, as easily as he'd put away the cotton candy-scented lip balm he'd taken from Cassandra (in a little wooden box by his bed, for those nights when the dreams were too intense). Sternly, silently, he reprimanded himself. Those of the Midnight Sun were not to indulge their emotions, even in times of such great stress. He couldn't allow this to happen again, no matter what happened-- even to his brother. 

With this in mind, it was easy for him to interact with Cassandra again, to lure her into a trap on board one of the Midnight Sun's vessels. He wanted so much to appeal to the girl, to try and change her mind, even when he could see in her eyes that it would have been useless, but he kept his emotions firmly in check. It was important that Ms. Mauvais have no hint of what he was feeling, lest he be punished for his indiscretion. 

It was a different story when he saw _him_. When he heard a voice mimicking his own so exactly, his heart knew what it meant and it sang out the same as it had in the pyramid when Cassandra had used the code to trick him. Ah, and when he spotted him, face to face out in the snow near the grave of Lord Pharaoh, there stirred a feeling like nothing he could describe. The face was the same as the one that appeared in his dreams to taunt him, but it showed every one of the years that had passed since the last time they had seen one another. The soft hair had turned gray with age, the hands that had given him comfort in his childhood wrinkled and small. When he spoke, even his voice seemed to have changed, but its color was exactly the same, and that shook Dr. L to the core. 

Despite all he'd devoted himself to the Midnight Sun, he couldn't help but hesitate, just for a moment. He was wicked and he belonged to that society. He could not live without the elixirs it gave him to keep him young and healthy. Yet he wanted to go with Pietro, to stand by him and never leave his side again. For a fleeting moment, he wanted to denounce the people he had given his whole life to in exchange for promises of power and immortality. He just couldn't do it. 

\-- 

He had, just once, doubted the Midnight Sun. It had only lasted for a moment, but that moment was enough to seal his fate irreversibly onto that path decided by "the accident". By day he went on being a great and cruel leader and serving his society faithfully, unflinchingly doing whatever he needed to in order to further the Midnight Sun's goals along with his own. By night the dreams persisted, and he went on trying to deny them, to push them away. Decades had gone by, but he knew he could never feel whole without Pietro. 

It was infuriating to have to look at that girl, Cassandra, and see the way she would frown at him when she came to stand in his way. It looked to him like the disapproving scowl of Pietro, shunning him for his decisions. Dr. L hated that look, hated that girl. He hated knowing that she worked for Pietro, carried out his bidding, thwarted him on his behalf. 

To him, Cassandra became Pietro's avatar, representing him and his will. His desire to make her his student forgotten, Dr. L would now do anything to rid himself of her presence, if he couldn't make her into something tolerable to himself. And her will was every bit as unbending as Pietro's. Dr. L knew that there was nothing he could ever do to sway Cassandra and change her loyalty from one brother to the other. He had thought of himself as all-powerful, yet he could not have his brother, could not have his acolyte, could not crush the spirit of a little girl. He had thought of his own will as perfect, yet he was weak enough to want those things in the first place. 

These thoughts made his blood boil, although his face stayed carefully expressionless. Here he was, on a filthy tour bus, hiding like a rat because they had placed their bets with the wrong man-- no, because they had been bested yet again, as simple as that. It was because of that girl, because of Pietro's acolyte. He could not have her and he could not beat her and he shouldn't want so much to do either of those things. She had him in checkmate simply by existing, she lived to infuriate him, and she reminded him over and over again that he couldn't have his brother by his side; that he wanted it more than immortality itself. 

Frustration bubbling over, expressionless or not, he squeezed the stuffed toy lion he was holding until the seams popped. Oh, but he was weak! He couldn't afford to let that destroy him, and yet it had become painfully clear that it would. 

It was eerie, but no matter how much he wanted to live forever and forgo all emotions, he was unsettlingly aware that if he hadn't mastered himself by now, there was nothing he could ever do to achieve either of those things. In truth, Dr. L wasn't so certain anymore that immortality was even possible. Mauvais's mentor had died, hadn't he? And she hadn't been able to master her own emotions, either, in the face of such a loss. He had seen then that she was every bit as weak as he was, heard her whisper her confession that she had wept when she'd had to kill her prized horse in childhood. Did she think he wasn't listening? 

Antoinette Mauvais was a flawed creature like himself, and she was the esteemed leader of the Midnight Sun. A chill had crept up Dr. L's spine as he realized with starting and terrible clarity that they would never reach their goals at all, and he both covered and revealed this to his centuries-old companion with a carefully-placed comment. 

"I wonder what I shall feel when you die." 

When you die, he'd said. Because immortality was a fallacy. Because he knew that the Midnight Sun could make them live a long time, and make them powerful, but it could not make them live forever. It couldn't make them into Pharaoh, couldn't make them like the gods. There were limits, and he was seeing that for the first time since he had left Pietro's side. Oh, how his brother would have loved to see that moment! 

\-- 

He had twice doubted the Midnight Sun. It was all he could think about when Lord Pharaoh made his glorious return. All around him, his colleagues were celebrating as much as if not more than their discipline would allow, and yet Dr. L found that he felt nothing. This phantom was their founder, the man who first sought the Secret-- and failed to find it, Dr. L couldn't help thinking-- yet it didn't seem to him that Lord Pharaoh's appearance was anything worth celebrating. 

If anything, all the Midnight Sun's celebrating and all that invisible man's posturing just seemed to be getting in the way. The spectacle disgusted Dr. L, but he could not risk voicing his feelings on the matter. Even Ms. Mauvais herself was busy fawning over the great Lord Pharaoh, and frankly Dr. L despised seeing her so eager to please anybody. She was nothing like the cool, driven woman he'd been so excited to follow all those years ago. 

Another thing Dr. L did not like was the loss of his power and control to Lord Pharaoh. Suddenly, he was no longer the man whose great scarlet voice made the Midnight Sun act, made pyramids move and slaves work hard for their goals. He had been demoted, in a way, cast aside. And nothing made that clearer than the search for a replacement finger for the mummy. 

Was it worth it anymore to be a part of the Midnight Sun? He didn't believe in immortality anymore. He wasn't powerful anymore, and anyway, the charms of that power were starting to be lost on him, like gold that had tarnished and worn away. More than anything, he wanted to be with Pietro, whose face still visited Dr. L's dreams; sometimes as a child, sometimes as it was now, and always calling to him with a voice that was just as he remembered it. 

He hesitated to leave. He had given so much of his life to the Midnight Sun, and believed for so long in its goals. He had made an evil and wicked man of himself. He would become frail and die without the elixirs it provided him. How could he make that choice? Was there anything on this Earth worth dying for? 

Lord Pharaoh ordered his finger cut off to act as a replacement for the mummy's, to make the ancient corpse whole again so that they could get that damned Secret and grasp at immortality they would never have. Dr. L could not stop it from happening. He sat with a face like stone and let his finger be cut off at the knuckle, flesh and bone shorn neatly through, and he knew that he could not be a part of this any longer. A piece of him had just been taken as simply as that, for a goal that couldn't be accomplished. How many other people had had pieces of them taken as means to that same hopeless end? How many lives had been ruined or ended in the search for something that could never be found? 

He slipped his glove back on over a hideous hand and bloodied bandages. He did not want to fight Pietro or Cassandra any longer, especially not over a goal that couldn't be reached. As he set out to find the old circus that housed the Terces Society and its archives, he wasn't sure if he could cut his ties with the Midnight Sun, but the idea had formed in his head. It was real, and it was strong. And he found he rather liked the sound of it. Maybe it was because he was getting old after all. 

\-- 

He had thrice doubted the Midnight Sun, and he would never go back. The smile on Pietro's face, in his sparkling eyes, was the most beautiful sight in the world to the weary, embittered twin. The warmth in Pietro's voice, the gentle way he spoke to him, the way he defended him to the gathered members of the Terces Society touched that part of Dr. L that he had thought long gone and gone for good, even though it had stirred so many times since "the accident". He sat with joy in his heart for the first time in over seventy years, memories playing themselves out in the campfire as he ate popcorn and sat closely by his beloved Pietro. 

Dr. L told them that he was still a man somewhere inside, but Pietro said that he was but a boy at heart, robbed of his childhood. Could he truly say that he never really chose the Midnight Sun and all the wickedness he did in its name? He had been a boy back then, caught up in the idea of power, unable to understand its price. He had been kidnapped in the first place, but the reality of that had escaped him altogether. 

It didn't matter, though, not really; because in the end, he had been a part of it and every one of those atrocities he'd committed had been his own. But he was touched by the idea of being a boy deep down, unchanged by time and regret and hatred and everything else that showed in his gnarled and ugly hands, hidden under pristine white gloves. Maybe that was the part of him that had been stirring, the part that wanted companionship and anything that would bring him closer to Pietro. He embraced it eagerly. 

This could have been why Dr. L found that he was every bit as wounded by the hurt Pietro expressed at realizing he'd lied about the mummy as he'd been when he had thought Pietro dead. He couldn't bear to see the look of betrayal and pain in his brother's eyes. He wished he knew how to express that, but so many years of forcing himself never to show so much as a smile had taken its toll on him. He could only give him the last vial left from the Symphony of Smells-- retrieved after he'd gone back to the spa's ruins in secret and personally searched the pyramid tirelessly for many long hours-- and take his leave in sullen silence. 

His decision was made, and there was no going back. He never returned to the Midnight Sun, never took another sip of those wicked elixirs that had made him what he was. He grew old and he grew frail, and he found himself at last able to show a small smile to his reflection in the mirror, to that sick and dying old man looking back at him, his face finally a match for his hands. There was one thing left to do. He had to see Pietro once more. 

He hadn't expected the end to come so quickly. He had hoped to have more time, to be able to speak to his brother. He was sure he could never be forgiven, but he felt it might be enough to show Pietro what he had done, that he really was his brother, Luciano. He wanted to be the young boy Pietro had said he was, deep down inside, bright-eyed and innocent, and that's how he felt, just for a fleeting moment, when he saw that mold-mottled old big top looming on the horizon ahead of him. Even if forgiveness wasn't what he would receive when he got there, he felt like that's who he was for the first time since he had left the home where he belonged. 

By the time he arrived at that old circus, the walk too long and strenuous for aching limbs and failing organs, he knew there wasn't much time left. He could feel his frail body shutting down already. He saw Pietro just outside his rickety trailer and tried to speak, but it was so difficult. His twin's eyes widened, and he rushed over to him-- he must have looked awful to him, he realized. His dependence on those elixirs was even worse than he'd thought. They'd made such a skeletal figure of him, worn and weary, so much dry and wrinkled skin wrapped around aching bones with little in between. 

He murmured apologies to Pietro, but he wasn't sure that he heard them. Pietro helped him inside, laid him in his bed. Luciano had just enough strength left to whisper _arrivederci._

\-- 

He had forsaken the Midnight Sun entirely. It was the best decision he'd probably ever made in his life, and he faced the end knowing this, and embracing it. He felt a kind of peace and contentment in the fact that Pietro was there when he passed on, and a pride in himself that he had never known before, because he had done the right thing. He had helped Pietro and Cassandra, he had cut his ties with that society that made a monster of him, and he had given up the elixirs that kept him unnaturally young. He had given his life in retribution for a lifetime of mistakes. That was something worth dying for. 

It was only then that he learned the nature of the Secret, if not the Secret itself, and the irony was such that he would have laughed, had he been alive to appreciate it. L'altro lato, that was the Secret they had sought for so long. It had never even truly been about immortality at all. Luciano had been right about that. 

He wasn't sure where he was anymore, but he soon caught sight of his brother, and that was all that mattered. Pietro smiled, and he looked as young as when Luciano had left his side. He opened his arms wide, and Luciano ran to him through a bright flowered field like the boy he had been so briefly, throwing himself into his arms with a cry of unrestrained joy. Pietro swung him around and held him tightly. Luciano buried his face in his twin's shoulder, squeezing him with all his might. ☆ 


End file.
